Tons of Garbage Threaten China’s Three Gorges Dam

After the BP oil spill which has yet to see final resolution, there could be another environmental or safety catastrophe waiting to happen, this time in China.

The country’s Three Gorges Dam could soon find itself turning into a huge cesspool of raw sewage and chemical waste brought about by thousands of tons of garbage that have been washed down by recent torrential rain.

In fact the garbage pile-up is so thick in some areas o the dam that people can already stand and walk on it!

The dam, which is the world’s largest hydropower project, and was built partly to tame flooding along the Yangtze River which killed over 4,000 people in 1998, also serves as the passageway from the Yangtze River to the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China’s less-developed western interior provinces.

However, even Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation admits that, “Such a large amount of debris could damage the propellers and bottoms of passing boats, (and) “the decaying garbage could also harm the scenery and the water quality.”

Chen added that 3,000 tons of rubbish was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.